New Gatekeepers of Small Business Entrepreneurship

When is the last time you opened a phone book? As recent as 15 years ago, if your company name and address didn't appear in a local or regional phone book, you simply didn't exist in the market. Print is dead right? Not exactly, it's just going through fundamental changes that are redefining its role within an increasingly digital environment The internet and the rapid creation of digital technologies has flung open the doors of opportunity and provided exciting, groundbreaking tools for small business owners. These tool help to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of business worldwide, giving smaller entrepreneurs new opportunities that were previously unavailable. With the emergence of digital small business, owners, CEOS, and new entrepreneurs have all been given an alternative path to creating success in their business venture in regards to making profit and participating in the economy in general.

These innovations – and the new digital services that allow small businesses to compete alongside much larger enterprises – are firmly rooted in cloud computing. Cary Landis, one of the original creators of NIST's cloud computing reference architecture and founder of SaaSMaker, said, "The cloud has become the new gatekeeper of small business entrepreneurship. The ready availability of low-cost, reliable and secure infrastructure, along with platforms that now allow for the creation of market-ready apps, has created vast new markets. App development, and the consequent marketing, sales, and maintenance of those apps, were once the domain of a small high-tech community. Today's platform-as-a-service offerings that allow non-developers to have a seat at the table, are responsible for a new wave of entrepreneurship."

Tools like SaaSMaker are at the forefront of a new "dotcloud boom," marked by a new wave of entrepreneurial opportunities that are much more accessible – making today's imminent boom in development much more far-reaching than the dotcom boom of the nineties.

A Digital Storefront

One way entrepreneurs are taking back their business is by redefining the most profitable revenue streams and utilizing new cloud-based and accessible technologies like SaaSMaker, and the Square Reader.

How does the average customer interact with your business at the point of sale? Are they located locally or globally? Square successfully changed the rules for who can accept payments, where payments can be accepted, and why we would even pay for a service in the first place. Though the story of Square is far from over, their most recent stock prospects seem to be failing to gain efficient profits in 2016. Current CEO Jack Dorsey, returned to manage both the Twitter/Square brands simultaneously and opened up the company for IPO in 2015. Their public shares have been steady, but Dorsey's famous words still ring true, "The strongest thing you can cultivate as an entrepreneur is to not rely on luck but cultivating an ability to recognize fortunate situations when they are occurring." Last year, Square processed an estimated 30 billion in transactions for its merchants, many of them small businesspersons and brand new entrepreneurs who launched their businesses on a shoestring.

Square's team is still fighting vigorously for market share from the PayPal giant, and went one step further by creating an open-sourced environment for outsiders to create integrated apps to fully take advantage of their rapidly growing technology. Despite low earnings reports, Square is continuing to diversify and recently began breaking into the field of small business loans to successful merchants. This technology gives entrepreneurs an alternative route to financial independence apart from the big banking models of decades past.

Benefits of bypassing the established institutions include reaching a wider, global audience as well as changing the rules of communication and even corruption. According to a recent Marlincash blog, "A digital receipt doesn't lie and we might take them for granted but many global consumers really need them. For families that rely on remittances sent home by expatriate loved ones, that Internet access is a lifeline, and it's also the solution to countless billing and logistics challenges when buying foreign goods."

Social Media: The New Gatekeeper of Small Business Marketing

Social media is everywhere and it surely seems like there's no end in sight. Luckily, small businesses can ride the backs of tech firms by applying their professional image and message to a very personal medium. The average social media consumer is content to spend countless hours searching, liking, posting, re-posting, and sharing content. This digital "word-of-mouth" is perfect for any business to utilize because it is the digital equivalent of having a solid reputation.

With any new opportunity, there are benefits and drawbacks. In the realms of social media, the danger comes when entrepreneurs fail to convert their real-world reputation into an accurate digital counterpart. A Facebook page is one of the most basic internet presences available, its free and widely used by business and non-business owners alike. This "local and global" approach allows marketing to bypass physical location and reach as far as an internet connection can travel. Current Facebook operations can "boost" posts for a fee. On the other hand, un-boosted posts are by default suppressed from reaching their full potential. Nothing in life is free. Furthermore, if there is not a dedicated information manager, the continuous outpouring of digital information is likely to swallow up a business and suppress its reach to consumers permanently.

Take SEO for instance. Because every business wants search engine optimization, small businesses are forced to keep pace with larger, worldwide names who are also trying to turn up at the top of the search results. Visibility mistakes are made by exclusively focusing on a single source of online presence. Exposure can be effectively limited or outsourced as inaccurate information by other search engines fighting to be current. For instance, when updating core information ( i.e. address, phone number, business hours, etc.) Yelp, Manta, and other business minded networks will borrow accessible information and post on the owner's behalf despite the possibility of that information potentially changing or being inaccurate in the first place.